Korean Peninsula

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, one of my favourite political quotations is the famous remark of Edmund Burke that for evil to triumph requires only that good men remain silent. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, are wonderful examples of good men and good women not remaining silent. The courage that was required to visit North Korea time and again in the face of all kinds of discouragements, fears and threats is greatly to the credit of them both, and they stand as Members of this House with every possible right to claim the respect and admiration of us all.

I begin by saying about North Korea that it is, as indeed the noble Lord, Lord Alton, implied, a deeply traumatised state. It is a state with a very strong history of being victimised—by the Japanese, by the Chinese and by those in other countries—and one that has never really recovered its balance from that terrible history. The strange thing about North Korea—and in this respect I think it is unlike Iran—is that the idea that one might sacrifice one’s population to a nuclear attack does not seem to cross the minds of the North Korean regime in the way that I think it crosses the minds of all other regimes, including nuclear powers, such as India and Pakistan, and would-be nuclear powers, such as Iran. North Korea has destroyed or allowed the destruction of such a large part of its civilian population that the one great barrier against using a nuclear weapon—the fear of losing one’s own population—probably has less effect in North Korea than in any other country on the face of the earth. That is the most frightening thing about North Korea. It looks like a county whose regime would be capable of using a nuclear weapon because in the end saving the regime is more important than saving the population.

Let us look briefly at the security history, although I wholly take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that that is in many ways secondary to the terrible, indescribably awful human rights regime that has been conducted for so long by this extraordinarily strange dynasty of Kim Il-sung and his successors, which has become a kind of secondary religious heresy demanding the deification of its own leadership. The story in North Korea is one of having walked away altogether from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty—the NPT—to which it originally belonged. It walked away from the NPT in order to breach some of the key provisions, one of the most important being that there would not be a continuation by its members of nuclear testing in the face of what has not been a new treaty, tragically, but what has certainly been a very long period of postponement and delay when no nuclear power, with the single exception of North Korea, has continued to test nuclear weapons. Other countries are frightening in their own way, but this direct breach of this key provision, widely morally accepted, if not legally accepted, is an extremely disturbing fact.

North Korea has about five or six nuclear bombs, based, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, rightly said, on the use of plutonium, ironically originally provided as part of the nuclear materials for peace movement in the United States in the 1970s. It broke the understanding and conditions of that provision of nuclear materials for peace by deliberately saving the plutonium from that programme and using it as the origins of its relatively small nuclear arsenal. The best information we have is that something between six and eight fully realised nuclear weapons are owned by North Korea. That is one of the smallest nuclear arsenals in the world but it is still one capable of creating immense and savage destruction.

North Korea went ahead to produce a great many short-range ballistic missiles—we believe that it has some hundreds—and also medium-range ballistic missiles, of which it certainly has scores. What it has failed to do so far, with the exception that I shall come to in a moment, is to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles, which has become a major objective of the regime. By an intercontinental ballistic missile, we mean one with a range of more than 3,000 miles, capable of reaching Japan certainly, but also the west coast of the United States. The first attempt by North Korea in 2009 to develop an ICBM failed rather obviously and conspicuously and was noted with some satisfaction by the rest of the world. Tragically, only a month ago, on 12 December 2012, once again the regime—this time of Kim Jong-un, the son of Kim Jong-il—was successful and the missile managed to find its way across Japan, flying high above Japan but nevertheless into Japanese airspace, before it crashed some time later into the Pacific. It was clearly a successful intercontinental launch.

At the moment, the belief generally held in the nuclear weapons community is that North Korea has not been able to miniaturise nuclear warheads to the point where the relatively small or low-power ICBMs it may be producing could carry them intercontinentally to a country such as the United States. But even having said that, the fact that it is now capable of launching such a package, although not yet miniaturising it to a point that it becomes effective, is obviously not far away from what could be a fully fledged ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead.

The one piece of relatively good news is that the speech that the new “Young Leader” of North Korea made a few weeks ago to mark his taking over of power—although there was very little in it that was not Orwellian in its terminology and philosophy—contained a small sign of light when he spoke of creating a movement towards some kind of peaceful agreement with South Korea. The possibility therefore arises, which might be worth pursuing, of a non-nuclear Korean peninsula which fits into the pattern of the non-nuclear zones which have now been established from Latin America, by way of Africa, to parts of Asia.

The offer lies on the table, as it has for several years, in the six-plus-one peace talks, of which North Korea is a member, that in return for a decision to end nuclear testing and development and fully to accept the additional protocol of the nuclear peace treaty, North Korea would then have opened to it investment, supplies of food aid and a willingness to allow it to rejoin the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed out, that is a fairly distant hope at the present time for a country as strange as this one. If anyone deserves such a response and the good will of the rest of the world, then the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, do. They have gone as far as human beings who are not themselves in government can go to try to bring it about.